Most complaints about too much talk come with a great deal of talk attached. Dave Bonta's "Verbiage" does the opposite. It spends only twenty-odd words on the problem of having too many, and its central idea is that empty language behaves like a disease: it gets into the ear, it spreads, and the only remedy is to cut it off.
The poem begins mid-thought, with a lowercase "who" and no capital letter to mark a fresh start: "who needs his hearing so full of nothing". The line can be read two ways. It can be a sarcastic rhetorical question, as in "who wants their ears this clogged?" Or it can describe a particular person who seems to need that constant chatter. The missing question mark keeps both readings open. The phrase "full of nothing" is a small paradox, since fullness and emptiness are made to occupy the same space. The target here is hearing, not speech. The speaker is less worried about people talking too much than about what happens to the listener, whose ears are stuffed with sound that carries no meaning.
Then the pronoun shifts. The first line is about "his" hearing, a distant someone, but the second pulls everyone in: "we are all infected." The word "infected" turns the poem's logic from complaint to diagnosis. Verbiage is no longer an annoyance but something we catch from one another, which is an alarming way to describe small talk, filler and padding. The bluntness of the line helps. It is six syllables long, flat and declarative, and it has no hedging or qualification.
The third line supplies the treatment: "quarantine the word in a hole." The vocabulary stays medical, and the command is oddly specific. It says "the word," singular, not "words." Perhaps the poem means the word "verbiage" itself, or perhaps any single word could be the carrier. The poem doesn't say, and that gap invites the reader to supply a candidate. The English word "quarantine" comes from the Italian for forty days, so it carries the sense of a fixed period of isolation. A hole, though, suggests something harsher and less temporary, closer to burial than to a sickroom. There is also a sound-based echo worth noticing in a poem about hearing: "hole" is pronounced exactly like "whole." That may be coincidence, but the ear catches it, and it sits against the poem's opening image of something filled with nothing. The hole is itself a kind of nothing, so the cure for emptiness is more emptiness.
The form supports all this. There is no punctuation, no capital letters and no rhyme. The lines don't chime with each other; "nothing" and "infected" refuse to match, which keeps the poem sounding like speech rather than verse. The line lengths shrink and then lengthen again, from ten syllables to six to eight, so the rhythm never settles into a pattern that might lull the reader. The most important formal move is the white space. The first two lines sit together, and then a gap leaves the final line alone on the page. The poem quarantines its own last sentence, so the layout enacts the instruction it gives.
That self-awareness is what makes the poem worth reading. It is made of words, so it can't claim to stand outside the problem. Its response is to be as lean as possible, using just enough language to name the illness and prescribe the cure. A reader who finishes it in ten seconds may be left wondering how many words in their own day could go into the hole. Nothing in the text tells us when or why it was written, and it doesn't need that context. The poem works as a compact argument for restraint, and its brevity is both its subject and its proof.